Sea Changes

 

It's been my long-running theory that 1966 was a sea change year when the whole mood of the planet started to change. I started to spot it in recordings released mid to late-1960s. Obviously, The Beatles were at the forefront of that experimentation (such as playing things backward and various other studio experiments), but it wasn't necessarily the result of things changing in the world--it was simply that the technology was available. But that kind of experimentation had already been done in the avant-garde and in composition departments at universities where they were playing with electronics--and even farther back to the 1920s with Luigi Russolo and other composers. It was nothing new. But Paul McCartney was getting into that kind of thing, as was George Martin, so a convergence was occurring. Artists and musicians were witnessing a change in the world, as we are now, but in the opposite direction.